By Timothy Noah

Copyright newrepublic

The million-dollar gold card. The federal government already grants admission to foreign investors under its EB-5 program, provided the investor puts $1 million ($800,000 in the poorest areas) into a United States enterprise that employs 10 people or more. The program has generated some outrageous instances of fraud, but according to a May report by Bloomberg’s Gillian Brassil, congressional reforms enacted in 2022 cleaned the program up. Trump isn’t eliminating the EB-5 visa, but a September 19 executive order created alongside it the option to hand the Treasury $1 million ($2 million if a corporation pays) to achieve the same end. Again: Wouldn’t this money be better spent paying American workers rather than working off a tiny amount of a deficit recently doubled through tax cuts for the rich?

Government-built factories. In July, the Trump administration struck a trade deal with Japan that, among other things, required the Japanese to invest $550 billion in U.S. industries. Now the Trump administration is saying the money will be used to build government-owned factories to produce gas turbines, pharmaceuticals, and other products, with 90 percent of the profit going to the United States and 10 percent going to Japan.

That’s all well and good, but if Trump were sincerely interested in creating manufacturing jobs he wouldn’t be blocking at every turn the even larger sum allocated under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to create green technologies. Nobody challenges the legality of IRA and infrastructure-bill spending, which was appropriated by Congress. But litigants will line up to challenge the legality of Trump’s factory scheme—including perhaps the Japanese, who seem to have a very different view of what they agreed to.